The Spookening Review

It’s not Halloween yet, but we still have the chance to experience the scares and the chills in The Spookening, a unique game from Swedish developers Modesty where you play the role of the spirit of a recently deceased character that has to be brought to life, only to die again the following day, just to be brought to life once more.

So… how do you get your body back to life? That’s the fun part: by scaring the inhabitants of the city until they can be scared no more! You see – you are a ghost now and you can use your new shape to bring the chills to the humans who have no other business than find themselves walking around in the shadowy night of the city.

Every time you scare a person, they drop a “scared” star and the higher their horror, the bigger the value of your star. So you should focus on getting as much as possible, because these stars are what help you get back to life: collect enough before the time runs out and you have the chance to die again tomorrow! Mmmmhahahaha!

Seriously now, The Spookening is quite spooky and the atmosphere that Modesty managed to create is quite unique for a mobile game and not only. They also decided to come and help you with some special ghost-powers to bring the horror to that town to maximum levels: you can interact with various items in the city and turn them into horror factories. For example, you can make carts start running on their own, you can summon spiders from trash cans and generally bring all sorts of spooky monsters to aid your cause of getting as many scare points as possible.

But things are not as easy as they might sound. If you’re a ghost, it means that there are other ghosts as well and they have the same purpose as yours: to resurrect the meat shell they came from, so they are ready to steal all your “soular power” in order to do it. This means that they will start following you like the brainless ghosts they are and you can (and should) lead them into the light so they disappear for good. Not nice not to give others a chance at living (again) but one’s gotta do what one’s gotta do!

Modesty also brought in a bunch of boosts that we can unlock in The Spookening to make our life after death easier, such as invisibility (just imagine how scared the people will be if a ghost just appears in front of their eyes out of nowhere), teleportation abilities and many more. Actually, not that many, just a total of 8 so things can be improved here.

One of the huge strong points of The Spookening comes from the graphics: the game simply looks brilliant and the attention to detail is impressive. According to the developers, we have120.000 square meters of realtime shaded 3D world to haunt and spook over and over again. The soundtrack goes great with the overall style of the game, topped with screams from the people of the haunted city.

Overall, The Spookening is an original, entertaining and extremely well done game for Android. It has some terrific graphics, flawless touch controls and even though it’s difficult to get the highest score in each level, it offers the player an excellent adventure of the afterlife and a hell of a ride. A must try game!